This is an outstanding book. I teach a course for undergraduate and graduate business students to teach them how to naviate the gift and estate tax waters. I have used several textbooks that did nothing but confuse most students. This is the most helpful book I have found, and the students generally like it, too, once they learn how to read legal cases. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the laws affective gift and estate taxes.

este libro, que fue leido por mi hace ya muchos anos, es otro que me impresiono y me gusto. muestra diferentes vistas y perspectivas de la muerte de un ser querido. desde la negacion de los hechos hasta la aceptacion y la resignacion, pasando por diferentes estadios que son necesarios tanto social como psicologicamenete para superar la perdida. es de especial interes para estudiantes de medicina o de psicologia o para cualquier persona que quiera aprender a lidiar con una gran perdida. LUIS MENDEZ

This is an amazingly helpful and concise guide to the often complex and daunting world of patents. Mr. Dickinson's book has made my work and research much simpler. I wish someone had written this book sooner. Kudos to the author

This is the best in-depth instruction geared toward youth basketball that I have read. It gives parents and coaches step by step instructions for teaching the fundamentals of basketball to young players.

Excellent book, and extremely informative; I just completed the EMT-Basic course and the National Registry exam. The book was a wonderful source of knowledge, and reference. What I would like to see is perhaps a cheaper, paperback version of the book come out; we completed the course and had to return the book, and I just think that if it was more accessible, more students would have purchased it, instead of signing it out.

As a future EMT-B student I wanted to buy some books prior to my course beginning. I bought Mosby's, Aehlert's, and Brady's books. I finally got to this one (being the last I was to read), and have to say this is the best Ive seen so far. With clear concise text, and abundance of knowledge, real life situations, and amazing pictures (which Aehlert's has almost none of), I must say that this book is not only the most informative, but is also the most user friendly. It has a great index, glossary, and the anatomy pictures are cut outs of REAL humans. I mean it just doesn't get any better than this. I just found out a few days ago this is the book my instructor is going to use, and for a good reason!

This EMT Emergency book ROCKS! As an EMT student, I find this book to surpass all other EMT books in print. The whole class loves the book as well. I recommend getting the, self study Workbook that accompanies the textbook. Without a doubt, it wins a Gold Metal and a Five Star Award for outstanding publication and instruction into the field of the EMT - Basic.

I'm a novice amateur astronomer who bought this book as a reference. When it arrived, I found myself reading every page, cover to cover. Whoa! Turns out to be much more than a reference after all. The authors aren't afraid to go out on a limb and give their opinions, not just the facts. They cover every topic a novice would need, and do it in such a way as to make the reading extremely interesting. I can honestly say that this book has heightened my excitement about getting into amateur astronomy and I now feel well prepared to do so.

Even if you aren't a "serious" hobbyist, buy this book if you buy nothing else on the subject.

What a glorious book this is!! If you are a budding backyard astronomer,this is the book for you.It is written in terms that a novice can easily understand.Each chapter contains an abundance of info and gorgeous photos.The book covers explanations and suggestions for each step you will take to become the amateur astronomer you have always wanted to be.I cannot recommend this book highly enough.You will be fascinated by every page.And you will find yourself becoming more and more comfortable learning the technology behind telescopes,and astrophotography.May I also suggest that you get "Nightwatch," by Mr. Dickinson? Another gem,and a fine companion to this book.

You should not consider buying this book. You should just buy it. I held off purchasing it since I already knew a fair bit (or so I thought) about amateur astronomy, had already bought a great telescope and a bunch of accessories, and I knew of many other more specialized resources for specific topics (what to look at, astrophotography, physics of the objects we look at, where to find star parties and so on). Plus, published in 1991, it seemed like the book was bound to be outdated soon. However I ended up purchasing it, and reading this thing is a truly eye-opening experience. It is hard to imagine a more well-rounded, well-written, enjoyable and authoritative text on amateur astronomy. It covers many topics but somehow manages to avoid treating them superficially. Sure, if you get deeply into photography or optical design you'll want to get single-topic references. And you still need a star chart! But this book will help you get off and running in all phases of amateur astronomy. If you read this, you'll be transformed immediately from a beginner to one of the people "in the know" in your astronomy club and your enjoyment of the hobby will be heightened greatly.

Nearly everyone who's had a brush with American lit knows the story of Emily Dickinson - her poetry unpublished in her lifetime, and then even after her death, her verses seeing the light of day only after having been "improved" on by an editor who found her rhymes imperfect and her meter "spasmodic." He even went so far as to make her metaphors "sensible." The fact is, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom Dickinson had sent her poems, was a representative of the poetic establishment, and as with all artistic establishments then and now, was too rigid in his thinking and too impoverished in his imagination to comprehend a new voice of genius. As Editor Thomas H. Johnson writes in his terse but very instructive Introduction, "He was trying to measure a cube by the rules of plane geometry."

Of course other women of literature suffered something similar during the nineteenth century. What I wonder is, who is being misread, ignored or denied today?

Anyway, suffice it to say that this IS the definitive one-volume collection of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. It includes all the 1,775 poems that she wrote in her lifetime, and they are presented here just as she wrote them with only some minor corrections of obvious misspellings or misplaced apostrophes. Johnson has retained the sometimes "capricious" capitalization, and preserved the famous dashes.

There is a subject index, which I found useful, and an index of first lines, which is invaluable.

Dickinson can be playful...

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise - you know!

...she can be sarcastic...

"Faith" is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see -
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

[Alas, the Amazon.com editor does not support italics. The words "see" and "Microscopes" are italicized above, and it really does make a difference!]

...and grave...

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air -
Between the Heaves of Storm -

...and observant...

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true -
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe -

...and profound...

Love reckons by itself - alone -
"As large as I" - relate the Sun
to One who never felt it blaze -
Itself is all the like it has -

..and desperate...

"Hope" is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

...and self aware...

I meant to have but modest needs -
Such as Content - and Heaven -
Within my income - these could lie
And Life and I - keep even -

...and even radical...

Much Madness is divinest Sense -
To a discerning Eye -
Much Sense - the starkest Madness -
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail -
Assent - and you are sane -
Demur - you're straightway dangerous -
And handled with a Chain -

...and much more.

She is a poet of strikingly apt and totally original phrases imbued with a deep resonance of thought and observation, especially on her favorite subjects, life, death and love. She can be cryptic and her references and allusions are sometimes too private for us to catch. She can also be amazingly terse. But the intensity of her experience and the "Zero at the Bone" emotion displayed in this, her "letter to the World/That never wrote to me -" are second to none in the world of letters. Unlike Shakespeare, who mastered the psychology of people in places high and low, Dickinson mastered only her own psychology, and yet through that we can see, as in a mirror, ourselves.

This is the standard and authoritative collected edition of Emily Dickinson's poems. It is a book that will stay with you for the rest of your life. I can think of no finer writer of poetry in English who manages to invest so short and simple a construction - no more than a couple of lines in some cases - with such emotional force. I say 'simple', but her poems are simple only in a deceptive sense. An unfinished poem like "A letter is a joy of earth/ It is denied the gods -" (that's the whole poem) says more about the joy of constructing prose than any number of effusive efforts from the Romantics.

Miss Dickinson has suffered from having been appropriated by the rather dreary crowd of 'cultural critics' who cannot grasp that a work of art tells us primarily not about the social mores of the time it was written in but about the human spirit. She is especially vulnerable to this sort of irrelevant sophistry, having lived as a recluse for much of her life and thus being ripe for 'interpretation' that is nothing more than a recitation of modern political sensibilities. That's a shame, and it certainly shouldn't put you off reading her. So far as I'm concerned, there is no one - not even Shakespeare, not even Jane Austen or Dickens - whom I read more frequently, and with greater pleasure and benefit.

As a few have stated already, a lot of Emily Dickinson's poems appear simple on the surface. Don't let the simplicity or brevity fool you, boiling underneath the metaphors of Dickinson's poems are some of the most beautiful visions I've ever read. Intelligent, thoughtful..haunting are all words I'd use to describe her poems. She has quickly vaulted to the top of the list of my favorite poets along with William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe.

And speaking of her poems, there are plenty. All of them in fact, in chronological order allowing the reader to see the progession in her poems. This is a great book at a great price to be able to own all she has written.

Since her poems have no titles, there are two invaluable features included at the back to help aid the search for the desired poem. One is an alphabetical subject index, with words and lines linked to poems with which they belong. The other index includes the first lines of all 1775 poems.

An excellent all around souce for all your Emily Dickinson needs. Enjoy.

A book this outstanding is rare, as I can see from the customer reviews many have perceived. Paglia's book, which I read when I was 17, crystallized my thoughts on art, sexuality, and human nature: like her I was a freakish female fan of Oscar Wilde, the gay male sensibility, and decadence. I had truly been searching for this book since I was 13 years old and got my first adult public library card, and thereby discovered the endlessly fascinating world of literature and art--the existence of which I'd never suspected. I'll never forget sitting down with this book during Grade 12 Spring Break; my mother and little sisters were away visiting relatives, so I had the house to myself during the day and I sat in the dining room from the time my step-father left for work at about 7 am to the time he returned about 5 pm, reading. It was by far the longest and most difficult book I had ever read, and I took time over it because as other customer reviewers have pointed out, Paglia addresses such profound, disturbing ideas in such original, provocative ways that I did no less than go over my whole life in my head from my earliest memories to test Paglia's ideas. Needless to say, Paglia won more often than not: the myth of original sin is a better explanation of art and human nature than the myth of social constructionism.

If you are truly open to ideas and you love art, don't read this book unless you want your life completely changed for better or worse. Almost ten years later I find myself completely intellectually alienated from both peers and most professors in my university English program because I continue to fight UNCOMPROMISINGLY for art and independent thought (not to mention intellectual rigour and standards and good prose!), thanks to Paglia's inspiration. But it makes it worthwhile when I come on amazon.com and see that others have felt the same way I do. For you others, if you're looking for other *special* works of criticism (neither the run-of-the-mill merely accurate kind nor postmodern drivel), I recommend George Toles's A House Made of Light: Essays in the Art of Film and Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. If you read them after Paglia you'll have some balance, too, since Toles and Cavell emphasize the link between art and morality, while treating the subject with the complexity it deserves.

I read this book almost by accident back in 91 or 92 - and once I got past the first chapter or so - where Paglia has to set up the whole male/female light/dark thing - I was hypnotized by the words and intelligence and clarity of a writer that I now consider among the most erudite humans in the English-speaking world!

Paglia is a magnificent writer, with an almost inexhaustible supply of references and history and personal anecdotes and a brilliant way to make the boring:interesting.

WOW! Anyone who can turn medieval English poetry into a saucy chapter is not only a skilled writer but a brilliant one! Paglia married the old with the new and shows us the true power of women - and by the way - the reason that many femNazis hate Paglia is because Camille employs her sexuality like a weapon!

Want to know what sex and power really mean? - Read this book!

First Off: There's no way I'm going to cram into a thousand words everything I feel I need to say about this book. Thus, I'll stick to what I regard as the bare bones of its import. The first thing you have to realize is just how much Paglia owes to her mentor, Harold Bloom. I would strongly advise any potential readers of this book to read both The Visionary Company and The Western Canon before embarking into this scintillating morass, however unrealistic an expectation that may be.
This book, despite all the lip service given to the "Appolonian," is deluged with the Chthonian, and the reader will come away from this tome besplattered with the mud and slime of the swampy Chtonian Nature of the world than anything else. Mind you, there's nothing contradictory in this result. It is indeed just what the much-praised Appolinian artist does, according to Paglia: Reveal the Chthonian with a voyeuristic, Spencerian eye. This Paglia does with an elan and flair unmatched in critical writing.

But beware! Paglia, like Bloom, is reductionist. Bloom's ultimate take on more or less the same subject matter with which Paglia treats is Gnosticism, thus ultimately spiritual. Bloom sees a sort of warfare going on between the earthly and chthonian and the spiritual. He resolves this in Gnosticism, an heretical sect that flourished in the early centuries A.D. and maintained that this world is evil, created by a "demiurge" and that the visions of poets like Shelley are nothing less than emanations from another realm. For Paglia, all this is sexual, and Bloom would not deny a sexual element in all of it, but he goes a bit further in explaining it. Prime example: Paglia's "womb/tomb" of the Chthonian is simply a given. In Bloom, it is the prison of our Fall fom the Gnostic other realm. It fits into a cosmology.

There's a very weird realization that comes over the reader (at least this reader) when we come to the Coleridge section on his poem "Christabel" and the vampire Geraldine and continues creeping over him or her until the final chapter on Emily Dickinson. I know no other way of saying this than that Paglia BECOMES Geraldine to the reader. - I agree with her that Emily Dickinson is an extremely powerful and misunderstood poet and, indeed, have spent several ultimately worthwhile hours poring over her short poems to discover the sexual/spiritual depths. But, sorry Camille, Dickinson is just not another Sade altogether. But in the way Paglia presents her, with Sadean snippets of her poetry, the reader who is unfamiliar with the rest of Dickinson's work cannot fail to come away with this conviction. - For the record: I think part of Dickinson's persona is sadomachistic, but it is only a piece of a complex puzzle.

What we are witnessing and in danger of becoming engulfed in (It happened to me.) is Paglia' own mythopoecism. At some point between Christabel and Dickinson, Paglia becomes the subject of her work. We fall in love with her (I did.); but in the way that Christabel does with Geraldine. She lures us into her own imaginative fixation on the Chthonian womb/tomb of the female, and we identify HER with IT.

In conclusion, READ THIS BOOK, if only for the transformative effect it will have on you. In the last page of the book, Paglia says of Emily Dickinson that "She is frightening!" Yes, Camille,.....YOU ARE!

I enjoyed reading this book. The author captured the world of a liberal arts college, especially the non-academic aspects of this very inward looking environment. For me , the characters and their interactions were more interesting than the mystery plot. Joanne Dobson very effectively captured the pain some students go through with her character Sophie Warzek. This is a book I had to finish reading.

For the past semester, Emily Dickinson scholar, Karen Pelletier has fended off the unwanted advances of her Enfield College colleague, Randy Astin-Berger. At the faculty Christmas party, Randy gets drunk. When a bored Karen goes to get her coat out of a closet, she is shocked as a dead Randy fall into her arms.

The police rule Karen out as a suspect and enlist her help in investigating the case which takes place in the hallowed halls of academia. Soon, a second corpse, a student, is found strangled to death. Karen wonders what is the connection between the two murdered individuals. She soon realizes that the link is Randy's research which he discussed with the deceased student. As Karen investigates the two murderers, she gets closer to uncovering the truth, but also places herself in mortal danger from a killer who wants to prevent Randy's research from being published.

QUIETER THAN SLEEP is an interesting mixing of English literature with a first rate mystery, leading to an intelligent who-done-it. Campus intrigue adds bits of wit to the drama, leaving readers wanting more novels starring Karen Pelletier. Joanne Dobson scores big time with her debut novel.

Harriet Klausner

"The clost door flew open and Randy Astin-Berger found me for the last time, falling forward into my arms in a first, and final, embrace."

This first novel by Joanne Dobson, an associate professor of English at Fordham University is anything but a sleeper! This mystery is set in the posh, political world of a small, elite Eastern college where fools sometimes rule and enemies are made for seemingly obscure reasons.

Karen Pelletier, our heroine, is a suspect in the murder of Astin-Berger, but so are Avery Mitchell, the college president, single and very appealing; Ned Hilton, the professor who, as a result of the deceased's influence, did not receive tenure; plus any number of the students who were victims of Astin-Berger's charms and misuse of power.

Enter Police Lieutenant Piotrowski, overweight and overwhelming, a real contrast to the proper Professor Pelletier. He seeks her help in solving the puzzle and pays her a much needed per diem to research the Dickenson papers that seem to play a part in the crime. Karen finds the answer in her research and almost loses her own life, but for the now-slimming, more gentle lieutenant.

This reader hopes more novels featuring the college setting, and including the appealing college president and, of course, Lt. Piotrowski already are being written by Dobson.

Like many who started with Krakauer's Into Thin Air, I've now read a number of Everest stories, including more than one eye-witness account of the 1996 storm. Dickinson's story includes another description of the 1996 storm, but from the North rather than the South side of the mountain. Because of the different approach, Dickinson is not able to add detail or first-hand opinions on the disaster that played out on the South Col. However, Dickinson's account is well worth adding to the library for several reasons: it is well-written and humorous, it provides interesting information on the North route (the one attempted by Mallory and Irvine), and, more than any of the other Everest books I have read, it describes the conditions on Everest in such a way that a non-climber, like me, can almost imagine what it must be like to be so high, with so little air, in such cold. As he is quick to admit, Dickinson is not a high-altitude climber. He came to Everest to direct a documentary film about climbing the mountain, but initially did not intend to attempt the summit himself. Because he was a novice at high-altitude, Dickinson is able to describe the surprising sensations of oxygenless and extreme cold more convincingly than others, such as Boukreev, who almost assumes familiarity with such matters. At least for this armchair climber, these details are at least as fascinating and exciting as the dramatic story playing out on the South Col. And of course, because Dickinson did summit Everest and did return to tell the story, there is plenty of human drama and climbing excitement. I highly recommend this account.

This is a gripping account of the deadly storm which engulfed Mt. Everest in May 1996 and left a trail of dead bodies in its wake on the south face of the mountain. The author writes about the storm as experienced on the north face: hence, the title of the book. He writes about the tragedy which engulfed the north side of Everest, in which death also came calling.

The author provides many details of his expedition's ascent which is sure to fascinate and delight all Everest junkees. The narrative is compelling and absorbing. The tragic deaths of three members of the Indian team who reached the summit, only to become engulfed by the storm during their descent down the precipitous north face of Everest, trapping them over night, is heartbreaking. The callousness of a Japanese expedition who, on their ascent to the summit the following day, passed the Indian climbers, still alive but near death, and refused to aid them in their extremis, is truly shocking.

The author also rehashes the effect of the storm on the south face and the heavy toll of life it exacted there. Jon Krakauer, however, does it better in his gripping book "Into Thin Air". In the final analysis, the author, Matt Dickinson, a novice climber who first ascended Everest that May 1996, comes across as a self-absorbed, selfish sort of lout. Notwithstanding his own personal shortcomings, however, his book still makes for an absorbing read.

Matt Dickinson has written an enjoyable and easy read of conquering the North Face of Everest during the tragic 1996 season. Dickinson looks at May's killer storm from a different perspective, both figuratively and literally. While the ill-fated Fischer and Hall expeditions were climbing into catastrophe on the south side, Dickinson and his team were struggling their way up the north side of the mountain, facing a different set of challenges - and fatalities.

Dickinson sees the entire climbing adventure through the eyes of a non-expert. By his own admission he isn't a mountain climber in the truest sense of the word. This brings a fresh approach to Everest books, non-technical, gritty, and easier to relate to. He also has no axe to grind with regard to the controversies surrounding the 1996 deaths.

While some have criticized his detailed descriptions the physical demands the climb puts on a body, I think anyone who has climbed too high, hiked too far, or biked too long, can relate to the pain and exhaustion he writes about.

The Other Side of Everest doesn't have the drama of Into Thin Air, but it is a worthwhile read and nicely fills in your Everest library. A must for anyone still interested in the events of the 1996 climbing season.